Dean Nelson is the Telegraph Media Group's South Asia editor. He has been based in New Delhi for four years. He is @DelhiDean on Twitter.

Hey Ram! They're Selling Bapu's True Legacy

What would Mahatma Gandhi have made of the tug of war over his last few possessions?

I was thinking about this after reading this morning's Indian press coverage, which reported how the American â€˜owner' had offered to give India his trademark spectacles and other personal effects if its government agreed to triple its spending on healthcare or if it committed five per cent of its GDP to poverty reduction.

Is it possible that Gandhiji might have despaired a little? First, that the very few possessions he had, the bare essentials of sandals, spectacles, food bowl and watch, had been passed to a commercial collector by his own descendants. Second, that an American collector was seeking to use them to bully free India to address the poverty he hoped independence itself would eliminate.

Then there are the self-important pronouncements of his pious descendants expressing outrage that the effects could be anywhere but in an Indian museum; the various Non-Resident Indian billionaires being encouraged to bid on the promise of a government honour after they'd handed them to a grateful nation.

None of this seems sufficiently respectful to a Great Soul. Would he have wanted possessions he valued only for their utility traded as commodities? Would he have enjoyed seeing independent India taunted by an American opportunist over its failure to tackle poverty?

Another American, Martin Luther King III, paid a more fitting tribute to Gandhi's true legacy when he visited India last month to commemorate his own parents' 1959 visit where they studied the Gandhian philosophy of non-violent protest which inspired the civil rights movement and laid the first stone of one black man's road to the White House.

How much is that worth? What would it fetch at a minor New York auction house?